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D&D has become so much more fun since it clicked for me that I'm not the character, I'm the writer in charge of the character
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"this too shall pass" well can it fucking get on with it
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“Peace in society cannot be understood as pacification or the mere absence of violence resulting from the domination of one part of society over others. Nor does true peace act as a pretext for justifying a social structure which silences or appeases the poor, so that the more affluent can placidly support their lifestyle while others have to make do as they can. Demands involving the distribution of wealth, concern for the poor and human rights cannot be suppressed under the guise of creating a consensus on paper or a transient peace for a contented minority. The dignity of the human person and the common good rank higher than the comfort of those who refuse to renounce their privileges.” -Pope Francis The Joy of the Gospel
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The extended family of my cat, Mystik






Cats at the Temple of Philae, Egypt
Source: CatsWithJobs Reddit
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My love life 💓
There are things I want to do and then things I want done and they are not the same.
-Anne Marie Goolsby
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So I read this interesting post from the MensLib subreddit, about how men’s issues are always blamed on men themselves and never on society. The post itself as well as the comments are a very good read in digging in to antimasculism & the ways in which feminism has failed to critically examine men’s suffering under the patriarchy. For example (all bolding by me):
Here again, the problems predominantly affecting women are addressed by changing society, while those predominantly affecting men are addressed by changing men (or by telling men to change themselves). The difference is not that one approach is right and the other wrong; they are both ‘right’ in the sense that they highlight genuine issues, but the approach to men’s problems is more superficial. When dealing with men’s problems, we focus on the immediate cause, which is usually the men’s failure to cope with mental strain (“he should have gone to therapy”, “he should have learned to open up more”); in contrast, when dealing with women’s problems, we focus on “the cause of the cause”, and try to remove the systemic social issues causing the mental strain, rather than telling the victims what they should have done to better cope with it.
I think this is a great point, and something we really need to tackle. OP also goes on to talk about self-repression, comparing girls avoiding sexual harassment and boys avoiding bullying:
Boys (and men) are notorious for repressing their emotions. They have a good reason: in boys’ peer groups, a failure to control your emotions is almost as shameful as a failure to control your bladder; it is a sign of weakness, and any sign of weakness makes you a target for bullying and ridicule. So boys learn to wear a permanent mask of aloof toughness to avoid inadvertently revealing any sign of weakness or uncontrolled emotion, and many keep this habit into adulthood. It is generally well recognized that suppressing emotions is unhealthy in the long run, but it seems to me that the commonly proposed antidote is misguided: boys (or men) are told to “just open up more and be vulnerable” or to “learn how to cry”, as if their reluctance to show emotions were some kind of irrational emotion-phobia, rather than a perfectly reasonable, perhaps even necessary, defense against the ridicule, contempt and loss of respect that society inflicts upon those who can’t keep their emotions in check in the proper “manly” way.
It’s something we don’t really question in mainstream feminism. Women’s issues have a societal root, and men’s issues are issues that men put on themselves, and therefore men just need to fix it themselves and change.
And while yes, we all have a responsibility to unlearn harmful societal teachings, just saying “men need to fix their shit” doesn’t help anyone. I’ve been annoyed for a while at how people will react to men suffering under the patriarchy with “UGH they need to go to therapy”, as if
Needing therapy is a sign of failure or a bad thing, and someone not going to therapy when they need to is them being an asshole on purpose and not potentially a sign of them not feeling safe enough to go to therapy, feeling too ashamed, not having enough money or time, etc.
Individual men getting individual therapy will solve the societal problems of forcing boys and men to repress their emotions and view themselves as only valuable if they can perform manual labor and have a lot of sex with women. It’s a problem that is only perpetuated by men themselves and if they just stopped doing that, then the problem would disappear.
No self-respecting feminist would ever react to a woman obviously suffering from the patriarchy with “ugh, she needs to go to therapy and fix herself.” Yes, therapy would be helpful most likely, but that’s not going to actually fix the underlying cause of her issues. So why do we, as feminists, think that “men just need to fix themselves” is an okay response to societal suffering under the patriarchy?
Who does this help? Who benefits from us ignoring these issues? Why do we assume that men’s experiences under the patriarchy are so one-dimensional and that we have no responsibility for unlearning our societal biases around men and masculinity?
Someone in the comments also added this quote from the “perpetually relevant” I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out essay by Jen Coates:
Have you noticed, when a product is marketed in an unnecessarily gendered way, that the blame shifts depending on the gender? That a pink pen made “for women” is (and this is, of course, true) the work of idiotic cynical marketing people trying insultingly to pander to what they imagine women want? But when they make yogurt “for men” it is suddenly about how hilarious and fragile masculinity is — how men can’t eat yogurt unless their poor widdle bwains can be sure it doesn’t make them gay? #MasculinitySoFragile is aimed, with smug malice, at men—not marketers.
And then another commenter left this (and referenced bell hooks’ work on men!!):
“Do you agree that we tend to approach women’s problems as systemic issues, and men’s problems as personal issues?” Yes, and there’s even a name for this: Hyperagency. Individual men are assumed to be immune to systemic pressures because the people at the top of the hierarchies generating those pressures are also men. “And if you do agree with that, do you think this difference in approach is justified, or do you rather think it is a case of an unfair bias?” It’s pretty clearly not rooted in reality. The idea that billions of ordinary men aren’t beholden to the social constructs under which they were raised is just plain silly. I’d blame the empathy gap, but honestly I feel like it’s more than that. Patriarchy hyper-individualizes every struggle a man faces as a way to shield itself from critique and gaslight ordinary men. The motivations there are readily apparent. However, we see the same blind spot appear even in more academic Feminist spaces (taking for granted that “Feminist” spaces on social media are hardly representative of the cutting edge of Feminist thought). bell hooks once postulated that some Feminist women are deeply afraid of acknowledging how little they understand about men, let alone taking the steps to broach that gap.
Another person explained hyperagency by saying “Every single individual man is a hyper agent who is just expected to bootstrap his way out of the patriarchy through sheer force of will.”
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Just say I disagree and let the other person explode.
“i disagree but i respect your opinion” no. i disagree and i respect your right to have an opinion but i still think your opinion is shit btw
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things the kittens have so far yelled at me about with the righteous indignation of child monarchs: - i could not find my brother for 1.3 seconds - my brother bit my ears when i pounced on him - my brother refused to bite my ears even though I pounced on him - my brother has carried away the little mouse toy but I wanted to carry away the little mouse toy - want to lie in lap but no room - want to lie in lap but am on floor - want to lie in lap but it is too warm in lap - too small to jump on table - too large to get behind washing machine as is my sacred right - i am being prevented from drinking the coffee, a substance which would do me grievous harm - you are not letting me lick the inside of your nostrils - i am too small to headbutt you with enough force to adequately represent my affection
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Boris won’t stop annoying me for dinner even though dinner is in 40 minutes so I’m trying to teach Boris when to expect dinner using base-bean
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